


Citizenship

by shakespeareaddict



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, Carlos is alone and terrified, M/M, Post-Episode: e049 Old Oak Doors Part B, Typical Night Vale Weirdness, that phone call
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-16
Updated: 2014-07-16
Packaged: 2018-02-09 03:41:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1967598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shakespeareaddict/pseuds/shakespeareaddict
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Carlos cannot reach Night Vale (yet), but promises he'll try.<br/>Beware of possible feels, the Smiling God, and spoilers for episode 49. Also anxiety, I guess?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Citizenship

He is shaking, he thinks. Or else this world, or universe, or dimension, or whatever the hell it is, is shaking, great wracking tremors, the very particles of the air vibrating at a higher frequency than normal, which makes him feel like he’s shaking when in fact he is the one fixed point in this…place, and he’s just feeling the effects of the motion of this place. It wouldn’t surprise him. In November he’d been worried when his vision was blurry for half the morning, until Cecil had made an announcement about Night Vale being a bit “unstable” today due to some atomic-level maintenance; the year before he’d seemed to have lost his hearing and rushed to the station in a panic (hoping Cecil or an intern could maybe show him where the hospital was, or something) only to find Cecil relaxing his voice despite the glaring ON-AIR sign above the door. The host had explained by way of text that sound didn’t appear to be working today, but he was sure it’d all be fine tomorrow. The thought of the very universe shaking around a person wasn’t that far-fetched.

It was a sign of his mental state that his response to this thought was that it couldn’t be true because he was kind of a wimp in his _own_ …place, dimension, whatever. The thought that he could be the one fixed point in an entirely foreign place was highly presumptuous and probably a bit racist, or species-ist, or something. Unless, of course, it was shaking to show its displeasure with his intrusion—

_Now_ he’d finally done it. He’d passed beyond the boundaries of “Normal Behavior” and “Acceptable but Eccentric Behavior” and straight into “Crazy-Talk” for both Night Valeian and Outsider definitions of “normal”, “eccentric”, and “crazy”. He’d had a shock. He was in another place, had been in this other place for weeks since he’d walked into a house that didn’t exist and hadn’t found his way back, long enough to know this place was different. Not Night Vale-different, no; this place was old, and it had rules, non-contradicting rules, rules you couldn’t guess at because they were ancient and so ingrained in the minds of the usual inhabitants of this place that they can’t even begin to tell them, and not because the rules changed every other weekend depending on the phase of the moon. It was a place that stoically did not care about him, and, worse, it was unravelling in too-bright light.

Facts: He was in another place that was not hostile so much as frighteningly indifferent. He had been in this place for—goodness, six weeks already. He’d spent most of that time wandering an unfamiliar desert on the verge of dehydration. He had had to then collate the facts and observations made by other parties to determine the exact method of travel between Night Vale and this place, fight off Strex employees that induced varying degrees of terror in him, construct a device to keep a malevolent light away from a series of interdimensional gateways while fighting off a few more Strex employees, and have a far-too-brief conversation with his boyfriend before that had been cut off entirely. He’d been at the point of nearly tearing out his hair while trying to figure out a way to close the doors, and he’d had to find some way of communicating the idea to everyone without leaving his rather fragile light-deflectors alone for too long, and all that time he’d been holding on to the hope that he’d see Cecil again soon—that at the end of this whole ordeal Carlos would be back home, walking to the radio station while listening to the end of his broadcast, and when he got there the latest intern would let him right into the recording booth and Cecil would stop, and say his name the way he always said it, except maybe a bit more, somehow. And he’d fumble with his words a bit and cut to a pre-recorded commercial and Cecil would stand up, Carlos already stepping forward with open arms. They’d stand there for a while, Cecil’s arms wrapped tight around his waist, his chin tucked into Carlos’s neck, and keep holding one another while Cecil signed off, clearly distracted, and they’d go home and probably hole themselves up in Cecil’s apartment until it was absolutely necessary for them to leave.

Fact: The doors had all closed as soon as Dana, the only other Night Vale citizen here, had left once more.

He’d had a shock. He was probably _in shock_. He was bleeding a bit and his ribs ached, though one of the masked warriors had looked him over briefly earlier and given him some sort of tea that seemed to have some sort of medicinal purpose, in conjunction with a number of bandages over his worst wounds. Chances were, it was Carlos who was shaking, not the world.

He stared dumbly at the closed door, of well-worn oak with a stained brass knob and everything he cared about on the other side. Why had it closed? Why hadn’t it—shouldn’t it have _waited_ for him? He didn’t belong here, he belonged in Night Vale, Night Vale with its terrifying City Council that liked to feast on offerings from the public sewage system, Night Vale with the neighborhoods and streets and houses and rooms that relocated themselves every few months, the Night Vale where a _literal_ five-headed dragon could run for mayor and a river rock could have nice penmanship and a scientist looking for something he couldn’t even name could find it and a dozen other nameless things with a solid afternoon’s work.

_Didn’t_ he belong there?

He stepped away from the base of the light deflector closest to this door. It lead to John Peters’ farm, in the middle of his imaginary corn field. It was the door Dana had walked through, the door through which scores of masked warriors had come, dragging dead or struggling Strex employees and injured companions with them (or the corpses, and there were those). It was identical to all the doors through which his scientists had gone in the house that didn’t exist in the Desert Creek housing development. He had to avoid a few of the masked warriors to reach the door, but that was alright. The wood was cool to the touch, but the knob burned his palm before he could lay his shaking hand on it. Carlos reached into his lab coat pocket, fumbling for his flame-retardant gloves, and pulled one over his trembling fingers before trying again. The knob didn’t move under his touch.

He tried jostling and jimmying. He pushed hard against the door. He even considered trying to break it down. Still, the door and the knob were motionless. Finally he backed up and tried circling it. On the other side, he could still see the door, which was what anyone would expect, unless they’d been working with doors like this earlier in the day and had determined that the door existed on one side but not the other.

Carlos felt the slow collapse coming, the way his knees would bend as if under a great weight before buckling, how he’d wobble on them a moment before giving up and falling, first to his knees, then back onto his ass, then further as he lost the strength and will to stay sitting up, until he was lying there, looking up at the sky (mostly Void on one half, with a few brilliant constellations, the other half consumed by the terrible light of the universe uncoiling, the light of the Smiling God), trying not to fall apart inside as well as out. He felt how it would happen and didn’t brace himself against it, let it come over him and bring him low. The door had closed. He didn’t belong.

He screwed his eyes shut as a conversation came unbidden into his memory. _“There are three classes of citizens in Night Vale, you see. There are those who were born here; there are those who came here; there are those who were brought here. Being born here automatically qualifies you as a citizen, but if you move to Night Vale and you want to stay, there’s a ritual you need to complete on an anniversary of your coming, lots of paperwork, too, and you can’t leave town again for, oh, five years? No, five to ten years, depending on the year it is in the Zodiac that you complete the ritual.”_

_“What about those who were…er…‘brought’ to Night Vale?”_

_“Hm? Oh, if they survive their first five months they physically cannot leave town by any means, so they’re made citizens out of necessity.”_

He doesn’t think he was brought to Night Vale—he remembers filling out the application for the grant, he remembers packing and making arrangements, he just isn’t sure how he got there exactly. And if Carlos was a citizen because he survived his first five months after he was “brought” there, he couldn’t have been able to enter the house that doesn’t exist and whatever this place is.

If Carlos was a citizen, the door would have stayed open for him.

There was a hand shaking his shoulder, shaking him more than he was shaking. “Mr. Scientist?” said a gruff voice above him. It sounded familiar. One of the masked warriors, no doubt.

He opened his eyes obediently, then frowned. Above the concealed face of the person who had shaken him, the sky had changed. There was less Void-with-stars, and far more light, like a sinister sunrise.

“Mr. Scientist, we have to move on,” said the warrior frankly. “Your devices are holding back the light, but they won’t for long. We have to go.”

Go? Away from the door? When all the other doors were closer to the light, when this was the closest they had to the safety of Night Vale’s impossibly deep shadows? When it was a door that he could work on, to take him back to Cecil?

Cecil. Oh, gods, Cecil.

He’d worry if Carlos wasn’t back, didn’t call or text or something. He would worry…and worse things. He might mourn, he might think Carlos was gone for good. And Carlos couldn’t be gone for good, he had to get back—

But the light was advancing, fighting off the constellations, consuming even the Void, and it wouldn’t do Cecil any good if Carlos was caught in that.

So he stood gingerly in a slow process of freeing limbs and reminding them how to work, a process helped along by the warrior beside him. Beyond the door, the light reflectors were still working, but the light, like a living thing, was pressing against them, setting the edges aglow with the fires of the Smiling God. The warriors that still lived were gathering in, leaving the Strex employees and their dead fellows unattended. Their posse formed, they moved quickly through the liquid darkness in the shadow of a sandstone spire, headed away from the light.

“We’ll catch up,” said the warrior, “if we leave soon. The army is scattering for now, but we know how to find one another.”

Carlos looked back at the door, the side that hadn’t existed. “Can I—“ he tried to say, but it came out scratchy and unintelligible. He cleared his throat. “Can I stay just a moment longer?”

The mask itself seemed to turn to stare into his eyes. It was a tribal mask, carved in the likeness of a bird of prey of some kind, with no visible eye or mouth holes. The wooden blue eyes of the mask seared through him. Carlos stood tall and pretended he wasn’t as scared as he was.

Finally the warrior inclined his—her—their head. “A moment, no more.”

Carlos nodded and walked quickly to the door. This close to the previously-non-existent side, his nose picked up the smells of the imaginary corn fields, all turned earth and gunpowder and a smell described best as green, with the occasional whiff of pure Night Vale air on the breeze, which was sweat and despair and soft meat and shadow, friendly shadow. The familiar scent, the things he associated now with _home_ , seemed to clear his mind. He could do this. He could go home one day. He was a scientist; surely there was a way for a scientist.

_And as soon as I’m back_ , he thought fiercely, focusing on the inane, _I’ll start looking into citizenship paperwork. I won’t let this happen again._

In his jeans pocket was the familiar weight of his phone. He pulled it out carefully and clicked the screen. 97% battery, three bars, and a weak but present wifi signal. Fascinating.

Not thinking about the fact that he had no idea what he was going to do after this, he unlocked it and dialed Cecil’s number. In a way, hearing his boyfriend’s voicemail was a relief—he didn’t know that he’d be able to get through this without worrying Cecil if they had to actually talk. But he wanted Cecil’s voice in his ear the way that sentient computer on the numbers station had wanted freedom.

Still, he left the message without his voice or his body shaking too much.

When he was done, he pressed his nose to the wood one final time and gave a great inhale, letting the smells of home fill his mind…and then fade, as sensory input and thoughts did. Then he backed away and turned to the warrior once more.

“I’m ready,” he said, not anything shaking for a single blessed moment.

The warrior nodded and set off on a loping pace, away from the damn light and into the lovely dark. Carlos followed as best he could.

And if his shoulders shook occasionally, and his breath rattled in his chest, and his face was wet and vision blurry for reasons other than atomic-level maintenance—well, he’d had a shock. No one was around to comment, and anyone who had been wouldn’t have. He’d had a shock.

He’d be fine. Eventually.


End file.
